Journal of Global History (2019), 14: 3, 375–394 doi:10.1017/S1740022819000172

ARTICLE

The global/local tension in the history of

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro

Department of Cultural Studies, Universidad Aut´onoma Metropolitana, Lerma, Mexico Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied with ‘global’ visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and . Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label ‘’ generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homo- geneity, as well as to the use of as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as , history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on ‘the global’ within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplin- ary debates, and wider historical junctures.

Keywords: diffusionism; ethnography; evolutionism; local/global;

This article aims to explore the different ways in which anthropologists have dealt with ‘globali- zation’. To understand anthropology’s contribution to this large field of debate and theoretical discussion, I start by introducing a brief statement of what globalization and anthropology are. Since globalization is a historical process, I focus first on the beginning of anthropology as a discipline in order to present the transformations of some of its continuing preoccupations that are related to the larger field of global studies: the tensions between local and distant supra- local forces, and the tensions between heterogeneity and homogeneity. Globalization can be defined as the increase of the influence of supra-local agents and agencies in a myriad of locales making up webs of planetary scope. The noun ‘increase’ points to a process that unfolds over time, the ground zero of which is the beginning of the world capitalist system in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although some authors such as Andre Gunder Frank have argued that there were other world systems before the European one, I take the his- torical expansion of to the Americas, Africa, and Asia to be the beginning of the existence of the ‘modern world-system’, to use Immanuel Wallerstein’s well-known term.1 This expansion signals the building of interconnections and exchanges among loci and peoples on a truly plane- tary scale. The term ‘globalization’ was popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. Before it became another buzzword, within and without academia, it was discussed by scholars interested in the political economy of capitalist expansion, and in , imperialism, international relations, modernization, and development.

1Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: global economy in the Asian age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998; Immanuel Wallerstein, The modern world-system: capitalist and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century, New York: Academic Press, 1974. © Cambridge University Press 2019.

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These brief introductory remarks are needed to avoid considering globalization as a new epoch that started in the late twentieth century. If we keep a historical perspective in mind, we will see that what is truly at stake in this area of studies is the expansion and differentiation of Eurocentric , and the changes and articulations they brought worldwide. Globalization is, thus, a term coined a few decades ago to refer to the deepening of historical processes that were highly potentiated by the end of the bipolar world in 1989–91, and by the new possibilities of intercon- nections, assemblages, and discourses that were caused by the economic, political, technological, social, and cultural changes that happened in the late twentieth century. I will mention just some of the most significant ones. The end of the Cold War prompted the existence of triumphant flexible capitalist planetary worldviews, consolidating neoliberal and global financial capital hege- mony. Technological advances in the transportation, information, and communication industries affected the flows of people, commodities, and information on a global scale, and promoted another round of time–space compression, increasing the shrinking of the world, the full results of which are still to be seen.2 The construction of the European Union made possible new trans- national political ideologies and critiques of nationalist homogeneity. The growing influence of the environmental movement generated a new planetary awareness, which consolidated a global vision of shared destiny, and planted the seeds for the emergence of new transnational non-state agents and social movements and hopes for a global civil . Finally, fears of cultural homog- enization coexisted with new experiences of heterogenization that created different ethnic segmentations and fragmented identities.

Anthropology and the global In different ways, anthropologists have more often than not been involved with subjects related to what we call globalization today. A discipline that ambitiously sees itself as concerned with every- thing that is human, past and present, has been characterized by different efforts to understand interlocal relationships and to grasp what is universal and what is particular in a great quantity of human life-ways. It has depended on abstract notions such as humanity and culture(s) to make sense of humanity’s sameness and differences all over the planet. Its effort to encompass in a unique complex vision both the evolution of the species and its cultural diversity made anthro- pology, within the family of modern academic disciplines, the most elaborated research, method- ological, and theoretical effort dedicated to understanding alterity while keeping a single vision of what it means to be human. The interest in the different moments of the dynamics of biocultural evolution and in the worldwide diffusion of Homo sapiens and its culture(s) opened the anthropological imagination to different possibilities of the human experience in huge temporal and spatial scales, which propitiate a veritable comparative planetary history. The interest in understanding alterity also opened anthropology to distant others, led anthropologists to different interpretations of diverse human experiences, and turned them into travellers, into cosmopolitans who developed a cosmo- politics that envisaged the West as part of a much larger world of interconnections, exchanges, and power relations. I agree with , who sees a true interest in, and engagement with, alter- ity as the core of cosmopolitanism.3 In fact, for me, anthropology is a Western cosmopolitics that is a set of ‘discourses and modes of doing politics concerned with their global reach and impact’ and of ‘discourses that attempt to make sense of human diversity and of alterity’.4 I also view

2David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 3Ulf Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture’, in Ulf Hannerz, Transnational connections: , peoples, places, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 102–11. 4Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘World : anthropological cosmopolitanisms and cosmopolitics’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 2014, p. 483.

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‘anthropology as a cosmopolitics ::: that pretends to be universal but that, at the same time, is highly sensitive to its own limitations and to the efficacy of other cosmopolitics’.5 In this perspective, anthropology is the Western cosmopolitics specialized in alterity and in the importance of diversity for humankind that became a formal academic discipline in the North Atlantic by the end of the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that some of the most inter- esting works on the – that by Ángel Palerm, for instance6 – include pre- cursors such as the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who studied world history, and Friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1500–90), who wrote on ancient Mexico. These precursors also formu- lated cosmopolitics and interpretations of alterity.

Early involvements with the global Before proceeding, I want to avoid any anachronistic reading of what follows. Identifying anthro- pology’s early days with an interest in issues of global scope does not amount to saying that nineteenth-century anthropologists were studying globalization. But it does mean that their unit of analysis was the globe, and that they inscribed in the discipline an interest in planetary issues, and in questions that went far beyond anthropologists’ own Western ways of life. This is a heu- ristic characteristic that distinguishes anthropological thought. It is not by chance that evolutionism was the first great theory that anthropologists formally developed and embraced. It was in tune with larger visions of progress, which dominated science and society in a Victorian era aware of ’s centrality in the world. Evolutionism provided an organized vision of humankind on a planetary scale, one in which ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ represented the past, and the West represented the climax of the development of all previous soci- eties. It also showed the disposition that anthropologists have had, since the very beginning of their discipline, to establish interdisciplinary dialogues, and to borrow notions and visions from other fields. At that point in time, the natural sciences legitimated all claims to truth. Indeed, evolutionists aimed to prove that mental, social, historical, and cultural phenomena could be interpreted by means of laws, in ways similar to those in which the natural world was scrutinized. Evolutionists performed a contradictory double operation. On the one hand, they ethnocentri- cally placed ‘savages’ in another time, seeing them as a kind of laboratory of humanity in its pris- tine, primitive moment, and made claims about the inferiority of non-Western peoples. It is also true, as Eric R. Wolf wrote, that nineteenth-century evolutionism ‘furnished seemingly rational grounds for inequalities of all kinds and supported arguments for why savages and barbarians needed civilized guidance and missionary benevolence, or should be eliminated altogether’.7 Indeed, the involvement of anthropologists with colonialism is a well-known fact in the disci- pline’s history.8 However, the impact of anthropological research on colonial policies is not clear. The use of anthropologists in war and espionage remains a controversial issue in the present,9 but

5Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘World anthropologies: cosmopolitics for a new global scenario in anthropology’, Critique of Anthropology, 26, 4, 2006, p. 365. 6Ángel Palerm, Historia de la etnología 2, México: Universidad Iberoamericana/Instituto Tecnol´ogico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, 2005 (first published 1976). 7Eric R. Wolf, ‘Anthropology among the powers’, in Eric R.Wolf with , eds., Pathways of power: building an anthropology of the modern world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001 (first published 1956), p. 67. 8Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the colonial encounter, London: Ithaca Press, 1973; George Stocking, ed., Colonial situations: essays on the contextualization of ethnographic knowledge, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991; Benoît de L’Estoile, ‘Rationalizing colonial domination? Anthropology and native policy in French-ruled Africa’, in Benoît de L’Estoile, Lygia Sigaud, and Federico Neiburg, eds., Empire, nations, and natives: anthropology and state-making, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 30–57. 9David H. Price, Weaponizing anthropology: in service of the militarized state, Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch / Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011; Roberto González, ‘We must fight the militarization of anthropology’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 February 2007.

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it is a ghost that particularly haunts imperial anthropologies, and is far from being a universal problem for practitioners across the globe. However, evolutionists affirmed, in a kind of proto-relativist and anti-racist perspective, the humanity of the savages. They admitted the ‘psychic unity’ of humanity (see, for instance, James Frazer’s statements, in 1908, on the similarity of the functioning of the human mind in all races10), and believed that civilization had developed from the barbarians. In the same direc- tion, they claimed that laws and religions of civilized countries were derived from normative and supernatural experiences of ‘primitives’ (magic, for example). Edward Tylor clearly discarded the ‘bodily configuration’ and skin and hair colours as explanatory factors: ‘it appears both possible and desirable to eliminate considerations of hereditary varieties or races of man, and to treat man- kind as homogeneous in nature, though placed in different grades of civilization’.11 The universal vision of human potentialities and the attempt to understand the psychic unity were based on a wide range of comparisons, and implied a great effort of generalization to under- stand humankind’s past and present. As Robert Carneiro has shown, evolutionists used compar- isons of synchronic data to draw diachronic conclusions.12 Edward Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the , two of the most prominent representatives of evolutionism in anthropology, well illustrate the drive to make global comparisons and cross-cultural studies. Tylor ‘amassed a large body of data drawn from some 350 ’, while Morgan conducted a ‘worldwide study of systems’.13 Evolution(ism) was not confined to the English-speaking intellectual world. It was a strong European ideology, and was reinterpreted by thinkers of the Enlightenment, who brought forward interpretations that reflected earlier ideas delineated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (99–55 BCE).14 Indeed, notions of social evolution preceded Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) explanations about biological evolution, and had a great impact on social thought. Their repercussions are also noticeable in the early moments of French anthropological and sociological thought in the work of the illustrious French Sociological School. The influence of Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) oeuvre in Émile Durkheim, the great intellectual leader of the Année sociologique, is responsible, among other things, for the understanding that humanity has progressed through different stages into civiliza- tion. Comte, the father of positivism, proposed the law of three stages: the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage. The last is the most complex moment in global history, the apex of rationality and science as modes of knowledge production. For Durkheim and his renowned nephew , the simple develops into the complex, and the study of the primitives allows us to better understand how society works. Mauss and Durkheim’s article ‘Primitive classification’ (1903), and Durkheim’s efforts to interpret the Elementary forms of reli- gious life (1912) in order to make universal sociological and anthropological claims, illustrate this kind of vision.15 For the sake of my arguments in this article, what is important is that, at anthropology’s foun- dational moment, anthropologists formulated a debate on human history and an orderly vision of

10James Frazer, The scope of : lecture delivered before the University of , May 14th, 1908, London: Macmillan and Co., 1908. 11Edward B. Tylor, Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom, 6th edition, London: John Murray, 1920 (first published 1871), p. 7. 12Robert L. Carneiro, ‘Evolutionism’, in Hilary Callan, ed., The international encyclopedia of anthropology, 12 vols., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018, vol. 4, pp. 2146–58. 13Ibid., p. 2149. 14Marvin Harris, El desarrollo de la teoría antropol´ogica: historia de las teorías de cultura, 12th edition, México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1996, pp. 22–5. 15Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, ‘De quelques formes primitives de classification: contributions à l’étude des repre- sentations collectives’, Année Sociologique, 6, 1903, pp. 1–72; Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 5th edition, : Presses Universitaires de France, 2003 (first published 1912).

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the globe. One of evolutionists’ major problems was, of course, that the ranking of people in evo- lutionary stages meant a simultaneous glorification of the West as the centre of the world, in a time of major colonialist expansion. Thus, to a great extent, this theory is highly unsatisfactory because of its ideological underpinnings. In spite of major conceptual and theoretical criticisms, the influence of evolutionism did not completely disappear, either in society or in academia. Its resonances can be noticed in most dis- courses on development that, after the Second World War, classified nations with such terms as ‘underdeveloped’, ‘backward’, or – in an attempt to clearly alleviate the negative connotations of such biased vocabulary –‘developing countries’. Strong scholarly criticism paralysed evolution- ism’s influence in academia. However, it started to resurface, especially in its multi-lineal version, in the late 1930s, in , in the work of , who, in 1939, presented a paper on ‘the evolutionary approach’ at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association.16 In the following two decades, White wrote other influential pieces defending evolution. was another leading ‘figure in the resurgence of cultural evolution’ in the late 1940s and throughout the 1960s, together with ethnologists such as Kalervo Oberg and .17 Currently, the great questions about humanity’s cultural, social, economic, and political evolution remain as important issues, mostly tackled by archaeologists.18 Anti-evolutionism was equally central in the history of anthropology, and was strongly based on a competing nineteenth-century explanation of the global development of humankind: diffu- sionism. This theory was interested in understanding how the world has been structured and changed by the spread of culture traits from identifiable central sites (origin points) to other places, through cross-cultural borrowings that resulted from different kinds of contacts and inter- connections (such as trade, warfare, and migration). Here the focus is on interactions and exchanges. Diffusionism was first elaborated by Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), a German geogra- pher who challenged the idea that equal solutions or inventions were found in different places because of the psychic unity of humankind. He ‘is credited with positing the historical unity of humanity, which sees all human culture as a product of global interaction’.19 Diffusionism shows, again, that in the discipline’s early days anthropologists were thinking on a global scale. The echoes of its influence can still be felt, not only in anthropology but in all the social sciences. In current studies of how things, people, capital, and information move on a global scale, diffu- sionism reverberates in terms such as ‘flows’ and ‘dissemination’, which are commonly found in many approaches to globalization. Anti-evolutionism lasted for decades, with the criticisms and growing influence of one of the most important thinkers in the history of anthropology, , the German-born anthro- pologist, who is often considered the father of American anthropology. Although his work and that of his many students is more commonly known as , Boas, origi- nally a geographer trained in Germany, was also concerned with innovation and diffusion, a typ- ical diffusionist agenda. But he limited the explanatory power of diffusion ‘to areas relatively near to each other, where it was possible to reasonably reconstruct the history of cultural transmis- sions’.20 Boas’ influential critique of the uses of comparison, the heart of evolutionist methodology, was published in 1896.21 He favoured interpretations based on empirical evidence, and his his- torical method called for ‘a well-defined and restricted territory’.22

16Carneiro, ‘Evolutionism’, p. 2152. 17Ibid., pp. 2153–4. 18Ibid., pp. 2146–58. 19Marta Rohatynskyj, ‘Diffusionism’, in Callan, International encyclopedia of anthropology, vol. 3, pp. 1580–7. 20Celso Castro, ‘Apresentação (Presentation)’, in Celso Castro, ed., Franz Boas: antropologia cultural (Franz Boas: ), 2nd edition, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2005, p. 17. 21Franz Boas, ‘The limitations of the comparative method of anthropology’, Science, 4, 1896, pp. 901–8. 22Castro, ‘Apresentação’, p. 16.

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The interest in local-level descriptions, and the ensuing methodological emphasis on ethnog- raphy, had a major impetus with the paradigmatic influence of Bronislaw Malinowski, who pub- lished his classic The Argonauts of the western Pacific in 1922.23 However, in spite of the growth of an empiricist approach, anthropologists did not lose their interest in universal generalizations, or in exchange as a major feature of human populations. Suffice it to say that the kula exchange, described by Malinowski in Argonauts, was a sophisticated system of circulation of things and values. It provided an important source for one of the best-known general theories in anthropol- ogy, posited by Marcel Mauss in an equally classic essay originally published in 1925 in the journal Année sociologique.24 It is a magnificent exploration of the role of and of reciprocity in social life. I am arguing that the turn to the local, to the community, or better to the thorough ethno- graphic examination of each context, happened against the background of the assumption of, and dialogue with, the universal character of the human experience. The emphasis on the local did not preclude the wider, comparative, global, anthropological gaze. It is possible to say that the history of anthropology is a movement that alternates or combines tendencies with greater emphasis on the local and an understanding of societies as closed units, with others that empha- size the supra-local or the local and its interconnections seen as part of a larger web. In 1992, the sociologist Roland Robertson introduced in the academic literature the neologism ‘glocalization’ to go beyond the mechanical distinction between the global and the local, and to indicate the simultaneity of universalizing and particularizing trends in current social, political, and economic life.25 I would like to advance the idea that, more often than not, ‘glocalization’ has been a key issue for anthropologists because relationships between the local and the supra-local, or the inter-local, as well as between particulars and universals, have largely been, in one way or another, a preoc- cupation or a critical object of debate throughout the discipline’s history.

Supra-local interests, levels of integration, and Marxists The American David Nugent has shown how the growth of world studies in the social sciences in the United States was backed by powerful foundations and related to processes of empire formation.26 He pointed to the importance of the interwar period, and emphasized the central role that ‘area studies’ played during the Second World War and the Cold War to establish a new ‘geography of knowledge’, which was highly in tune with American military’s needs. According to Nugent, ‘area studies in war were designed to help address the short-term security concerns of US military government. Area studies in peace were meant to serve the long-term security interests of Cold War, global governmentality.’27 While the influence of area studies in the opening of American academia to study the regions of the world is undeniable, not all tra- jectories and scholarly projects can be reduced to it. The importance of , an anthropologist working at the University of Chicago, for the establishment of global studies is thoroughly explored in Katja Naumann’s essay in this issue.28 In the 1940s and 1950s, Redfield encouraged anthropologists to develop stronger relationships with history and sociology, to look beyond ‘folk societies’, and to do comparative analysis of world

23Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the western Pacific, London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1922. 24Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973, pp. 145–279 (first published 1925 in Année Sociologique). 25Roland Robertson, Globalization: social theory and global culture, London: Sage, 1992. 26David Nugent, ‘Social science knowledge and military intelligence: global conflict, territorial control and the birth of area studies during WWII’, in Anuário antropol´ogico (Anthropological yearbook) 2006, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 2008, pp. 33–68. 27Ibid., p. 62. 28See Katja Naumann, ‘Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective: institutionalization, post-colonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s’.

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cultures that were critical of Eurocentrism. Sol Tax was another anthropologist who participated in this effort with Redfield in Chicago. Interestingly enough, Tax, a child of Russian Jewish migrants, would later incarnate ‘the world mission of liberal democratic anthropology’ and move ‘firmly into the role of master impresario of world anthropology’.29 In 1959, Tax founded a ‘world journal’, Current Anthropology; in 1973, he organized and chaired the ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago. In the 1950s, Julian Steward, who, as mentioned before, was one of the authors who reintro- duced evolutionist perspectives in anthropology, clearly brought supra-local agencies back to the anthropological toolbox. He coined the notion of levels of integration to describe influences of supra-local agencies and agents, especially those related to ‘the culture of a modern nation’, on the communities that anthropologists observed. He argued that ‘a total national culture’ should be divided into ‘two general kinds of features: first, those that function and must be studied on a national level; second, those that pertain to sociocultural segments or subgroups of the popula- tion’. The latter are capable of being studied by the ethnographic method but ‘a great many dif- ferent methods must be used to study any national culture in its totality’.30 Although Steward’s propositions were somewhat schematic, they opened a window that allowed a former student of his, Eric R. Wolf, to develop, in 1956, a more encompassing and dynamic interpretation. Wolf based his notions on his research experience in Mexico. He thought that ‘communities and national institutions’ were ‘components of an encompassing web of rela- tions’, within which ‘the personnel of national institutions reached down into communities, while individuals and groups within communities forged ties to controllers of resources and power out- side them’. Wolf was more concerned with ‘the bonds that connect groups on different levels of the larger society’, and recognized that the ‘traditional models of communities and national insti- tutions’ had become ‘obsolete’. He thus noticed the importance of ‘brokers’, concrete social agents who acted as middlemen between ‘larger systems’ and people enmeshed in local, community life. He theorized that the study of brokers would ‘prove increasingly rewarding, as anthropologists shift their attention from the internal organization of communities to the manner of their integration into larger systems. For they stand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships that connect the local system to the larger whole.’31 By pointing out the existence of brokers, Wolf was also indicating, perhaps unwittingly, the possibility that this kind of agent could be studied by the ethnographic method. The influence of Marxist thought and of a wider vision of historical interconnections were features of Wolf’s scholarship that would only accrue with the passage of time. Indeed, Marxists were well aware of how capitalist global expansion was crucial for the understanding of the world. Romain Lecler, in his article in this issue, shows how The communist manifesto (1848), written by and Friedrich Engels, anticipated many of the issues that would later be analysed by scholars of globalization studies.32 McCarthyism spread fears of communist influence in the US from the late 1940s through the 1950s, and created several, mostly invisible, negative effects in teaching, writing, and funding prac- tices that marked the development of American anthropology in the Cold War. In his book about McCarthyism and American anthropology, David Price states that ‘anthropologists during the early Cold War were keenly aware of the dangers of openly applying Marxist analysis in their

29George W. Stocking, ‘“Do good young man”: Sol Tax and the world mission of liberal democratic anthropology’, in Richard Handler, ed., Excluded ancestors, inventible traditions: essays toward a more inclusive history of anthropology, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, pp. 171–264; Sydel Silverman, ‘The first 50 years: a social experiment: Sol Tax, Paul Fejos, and the origins of Current Anthropology’, Current Anthropology, 50, 6, 2009, p. 949. 30Julian H. Steward, ‘Levels of sociocultural integration: an operational concept’, in Theory of culture change: the method- ology of multilinear evolution, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972 (first published 1955), pp. 46–8, 51. 31Eric R. Wolf, ‘Aspects of group relations in a complex society: Mexico’, in Wolf with Silverman, Pathways of power, pp. 124, 136, 138. 32See Romain Lecler, ‘What makes globalization really new? Sociological views on our current globalization’.

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work, and many altered their work accordingly. ::: Other anthropologists simply avoided con- sidering Marxist approaches to social phenomena altogether.’33 Outside the US, during the 1960s and 1970s, there were strong developments of Marxist anthropologies, especially in France and . The centrality of the concept of social reproduction in the work of and of other French Marxists in the 1970s played an important role in ‘the movement in the direction of a global systemic anthropology’. It is a concept that ‘implies both systematicity and historical transformation’; methodologically, one needed to ‘simply ask whether the population in question reproduces itself based in its own resources or whether its reproduction is part of a larger regional or even wider set of relations and flows’.34 The 1970s also saw other important theoretical advances. Dependency theory, for instance, became a highly influential sociological theory. It was strongly elaborated in Latin America, espe- cially at CEPAL (the Spanish acronym for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the ), in Santiago, Chile, and was crucial for a reformulation of develop- ment theories, and for the understanding of capitalism, its worldwide expansion, and its articu- lations in national settings. In 1974, the Marxist sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein published his landmark work, The modern world-system, a book that impacted all the social sciences and beyond.35 The echoes of dependency theory are clear in Wallerstein, who posited that the world was organized in terms of relations between centre, semi-peripheries, and peripheries. Global cap- italist expansion had been a classical subject of Marxist theory since the works of Karl Marx him- self and of other influential authors, such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.36 However, perhaps Wallerstein’s most important contribution was to show that, starting in the fifteenth cen- tury, capitalism created a framework within which an unequal history of economic and political power unfolded, in a world where boundaries were relativized. A historical approach is another central hallmark of Marxism. It is thus no surprise that several Marxist anthropologists turned to history to do their studies, and found in the world-system approach a useful and productive notion. They thus became pioneers of the studies of globalization in anthropology. This was precisely the case for Ángel Palerm, , and , who had developed a close relationship over the years: ‘They gave priority to mapping interconnecting spaces and evolutionary trajectories through people’s lives and purposes rather than reducing people in the periphery to passive anonymous social groups ::: and dared to understand the larger forces of the modern world system according to local responses.’37 Ángel Palerm was a Spanish-born anthropologist who developed a prominent career in Mexico. He wrote, among other subjects, about the importance of Mexican silver in feeding the world system under the Spanish flag, con- cluding that ‘silver did not place Mexico in the margins of capitalist development but in its centre, although with a specialized and dependent role’.38 Sidney Mintz, another student of Julian Steward, and Eric Wolf, were two of the most important and prolific American Marxist anthro- pologists, and they were life-long friends. They finished their doctoral studies at in 1951 after participating in the famous Project, led by Steward. Mintz’s book Sweetness and power (1985) focused on how another commodity, sugar, was crucial

33David H. Price, Threatening anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s surveillance of activist anthropologists, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, p. 345. 34Jonathan Friedman, ‘Global systems, globalization, and anthropological theory’, in Ino Rossi, ed., Frontiers of globaliza- tion research: theoretical and methodological approaches, New York: Springer, 2007, pp. 109–10. 35Wallerstein, Modern world-system. 36Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline, New York: International Publishers, 1984 (first published in Russian in 1939); Rosa Luxemburg, The accumulation of capital: a contribution to an economic explanation of imperialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951 (first published in German in 1913). 37Carmen Bueno Castellanos, ‘World-systems theory’,inCallan,International encyclopedia of anthropology,vol.12,pp.6525–6. 38Ángel Palerm, ‘La formaci´on colonial mexicana y el primer sistema econ´omico mundial’, in Antropología y Marxismo, México: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2000 (first published 1980), p. 163.

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for the development of long-distance interconnections, new industrial opportunities, capital accu- mulation, and flows of people, and for the creation of the global market.39 Another distinguished Mexican anthropologist, Arturo Warman, would focus on the history of corn as a commodity, its global dissemination, and its importance for the ‘founding of the modern world and the world system’ marked by unequal exchanges.40 Wolf’s 1982 magnum opus, Europe and the people without history, is widely seen as the first anthropological work on globalization. It is an anthropological history of capitalist expansion from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. Anthropologists who study globalization, such as Michael Kearney, Jonathan Friedman, and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, praise, from different per- spectives, the importance of Wolf’s work.41 Keith Hart considered it to be ‘the most impressive achievement of Marxist synthesis in late twentieth-century anthropology’.42 Europe and the people without history is a book about historical interconnections, flows of people and commodities, and the articulation of forms and modes of production on a global scale. It reveals how the structuring of the world capitalist system encompassed, in contradictory and conflicting ways, a great number of ethnic segments over a period of five centuries. It takes the reader on a journey to all continents, and shows how capitalist expansion, whether in its voracity for new commodities or in its voracity for new sources of labour power in the form of African slaves, or indentured Indian workers, for instance, changed the configuration of the world. Modes of production are a central concept in the book. Wolf discusses the existence of three modes of production – capitalist, tributary, and kin- ordered – and remarks that:

The three modes of production ::: constitute neither types into which human societies may be sorted nor stages in cultural evolution. They are put forth as constructs with which to envisage certain strategic relationships that shape the terms under which human lives are conducted. The three modes are instruments for thinking about the crucial connections built up among the expanding Europeans and the other inhabitants of the globe, so that we may grasp the consequences of these connections.43

The book concludes by suggesting the concept of ‘ethnic segmentation’, a historical and anthro- pological notion that is useful for interpreting labour flows and the diversity they create. It is help- ful to see the internal ethnic diversity of large-scale political and economic units, such as nation- states, or of smaller ones such as labour markets – those of a factory or of a large infrastructure project, for instance – as end results, historically constructed by capitalist needs for labour power in different conjunctures and areas of the world. In Europe and the people without history, flows of labour migrants from Africa, Asia, or Europe are interpreted within the framework of a world system managed by capitalist interests. The capitalist mode thus creates homogeneity and hetero- geneity everywhere. It generates ‘a wider unity through the constant reconstitution of its charac- teristic capital–labour relationship’, and at the same time it creates ‘diversity, accentuating social opposition and segmentation even as it unifies. Within an ever more integrated world, we witness the growth of ever more diverse proletarian diasporas.’44 Eric Wolf wrote a tour de force, the read- ing of which is central for all those who wish to understand globalization, in a time when this notion did not exist.

39Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history, New York: Viking, 1985. 40Arturo Warman, La historia de un bastardo: maíz y capitalismo, México: Fondo de Cultura Econ´omica, 1988, p. 253. 41Michael Kearney, ‘The local and the global: the anthropology of globalisation and transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 1995, p. 551; Friedman, ‘Global systems’, p. 110; Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Globalization: the key concepts, 2nd edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 3, 78. 42Keith Hart, ‘Anthropology’, in Ben Fine, Alfredo Saad Filho, and Marco Boffo, eds., The Elgar companion to Marxist economics, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012, p. 24. 43Eric R.Wolf, Europe and the people without history, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982, p. 100. 44Ibid., p. 383.

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At the end of the 1980s, another Marxist made a very important contribution to nascent studies of globalization. In 1989, in the midst of the discussion on postmodernism, David Harvey, a geographer who at the time worked at , published The condition of post- modernity.45 ‘Time–space compression’, a notion that Harvey coined in this book, is essential for the understanding of structural material processes that have fuelled what he called the ‘shrinking of the world’ and the emergence and interconnections of global fragmented spaces, as well as the (re)organization of the relationships between places. Time–space compression is a concept based on the development of the transportation and communication industries, which annihilate space through time. The great boost in speed and simultaneity unleashed by the Industrial was responsible for the transformation of the world into a smaller entity, one where the entan- glements and interconnections rapidly and constantly increase. In consequence, the influences of faraway places in a myriad of loci further increase, generating more complex flows of peoples, information, and commodities, as well as more complex social, economic, cultural, and political entanglements. Coincidentally, Harvey would later move from Johns Hopkins to the PhD Program in Anthropology of the City University of New York, where Eric R. Wolf worked for decades. It was at around the same time that the sociologist Saskia Sassen published her equally influ- ential The global city: New York, London, Tokyo.46 Her book was particularly important because it showed that there were specific territories, metropolitan centres, in which global phenomena – such as highly dynamic digitized international financial flows, migratory movements, and increased ethnic segmentations – occurred or were structured. Sassen coined the expression ‘decentralization with centralization’. This important oxymoron revealed the contradictory and intricate nature of the networks of the spatially dispersed but integrated geography that globali- zation was generating. Her book also showed the need for specific territories which were capable of intermediating different functions organic to the development of globalization. Both Harvey and Sassen, prolific writers, would continue to make important contributions to the study of globali- zation. Their works have been and are widely used by anthropologists; in fact, they transcend disciplinary barriers, clearly showing the interdisciplinary nature of the debates on globalization.

Studying ‘real globalization’ and transnationalism In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, signalling the end of a bipolar world. The 1990s are thus the decade when ‘real’ globalization started: that is, when the period of a triumphant capitalist world began. The capitalist world system was able to spread to new areas previously beyond its reach, reorganizing global geopolitics, ideologies, and utopias. Notions of an unbounded, decentred, and deterritorialized world, of flows, dispersion, dissemination, transna- tionalism, and fragmented identities, started to become popular among anthropologists. joined postmodernism as an influential scholarly approach in the 1990s. Postcolonialism’s critique of Western knowledge imperialism was consistent with anthropology’s age-old critique of . The vision of a postcolonial world, in which hybridity was cen- tral in both the metropolises and the peripheries, was sure to attract the attention of anthropol- ogists, many of them highly involved in multicultural theories and politics. Two journals dedicated to the study of globalization were founded: Public Culture in 1988, and Identities in 1994.47 A piece by Arjun Appadurai, first published in 1990 in Public Culture, which is perhaps the most cited article on globalization written by an anthropologist, may be considered a landmark in anthropological debates on the subject.48 Appadurai proposed thinking about

45Harvey, Condition of postmodernity. 46Saskia Sassen, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Press, 1991. 47Kearney, ‘The local and the global’, pp. 556–7. 48Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Public Culture, 2, 2, 1990, pp. 1–24.

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globalization in terms of five ‘scapes’ that kept disjunctive relationships among them: ethnoscapes (the increase in complexity in ethnic flows and segmentations across the globe), mediascapes (how the media create and disseminate information, imagined worlds, and ways of understanding them), technoscapes (the influences of technology in the construction of global interactions and exchanges), financescapes (the global flows and hegemony of financial capital), and ideo- scapes (the global flows of Western discourses and worldviews of the Enlightenment, such as free- dom and democracy). Appadurai’s visual and combinatory metaphor allowed for the interpretation of globalization as a result of processes that unevenly merge, according to how they are indigenized in different places by concrete agents and agencies. It clearly pointed out that globalization and its results are not uniform. As a visual metaphor, ‘scape’ also indicated that, depending on subject positions, globalization could be ‘seen’, lived, and understood from diverse angles, and changed in different ways. Heyman and Campbell later criticized Appadurai’s work from a political economy perspec- tive. They argued that his approach comprised a formless globalism that failed to see the struc- turing role that capital played in globalization. For them, the emphasis on disjuncture was another form of reductionism.49

Ethnography and globalization A recurrent field of debates in anthropology revolves around ethnography as a crucial method for the discipline. Since ethnography was traditionally associated with delimited territories that could be observed and in which researchers could participate in several aspects of local life, the anthro- pological interest in globalization meant a challenge to this distinguishing disciplinary feature. George Marcus elaborated a well-known response to this conundrum in articles published in 1991 and 1995, for instance.50 He proposed multi-sited ethnography as a way of emphasizing ‘the continued value of but covering a greater range of sites’ as an ‘ethno- graphic approach to the capitalist world system’.51 The goal was to go beyond the empiricism that bounded ethnography to unique places, and to do research into as many connections and loci as possible that were important for the understanding of the subject under scrutiny: ‘Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography.’52 Pablo Lapegna wrote an interesting piece on the discussions and problems that anthropologists face when doing ethnography on the global scale. He contrasts Marcus’ multi-sited approach with another, which he calls ‘global ethnography’. Among other criticisms of multi-sited ethnography, this approach posits that there is a need to see ‘how sites are produced, which politics of scale mould them and what hierarchies are (re)created in the process’, as well as to note that ‘the mul- tiplicity of sites could be one among other strategies to investigate the causes and consequences of global process’. For global ethnographers, nothing hinders researchers from understanding how a single location became enmeshed with global dynamics, and has undergone historical changes, or was created as ‘local’.53

49Josiah McC. Heyman and Howard Campbell, ‘The anthropology of global flows: a critical reading of Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy”’, Anthropological Theory, 9, 2, 2009, pp. 131–48. 50George Marcus, ‘Identidades passadas, presentes e emergentes: requisitos para etnografias sobre a modernidade no final do século XX ao nível mundial’, Revista de Antropologia, 34, 1991, pp. 197–221; George Marcus, ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 1995, pp. 95–117. 51Maximilian C. Forte, ‘Ethnography, multisited’, in Callan, International encyclopedia of anthropology, vol. 4, pp. 2045–6. 52Marcus, ‘Ethnography in/of the world system’, p. 105. 53Pablo Lapegna, ‘Ethnographers of the world ::: united? Current debates on the ethnographic study of “globalization”’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 15, 1, 2009, p. 9, emphasis in original.

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Ethnography is obviously not the only feature to distinguish anthropology as a discipline. While discussing keywords in transnational anthropology, Ulf Hannerz shows that preoccupa- tions with proving that the ‘weakest’ exert cultural influences on the ‘strongest’, with multicen- trality, asymmetric flows, and counterflows, are not new.54 I agree with the criticism of ‘global ethnographers’, according to which ‘the assumption of a single world-capitalist system should not preclude questions about its heterogeneous formations and the diversity of projects involving global processes’.55 In this vein, based on developed in different parts of the world, I have proposed the existence of a ‘non-hegemonic world system’ that is a result of economic globalization from below.56 It is a set of production processes and trade chains that have generated a great number of cross-border flows and market places in which global gadgets, toys, clothes, watches, sunglasses, electronics, videos, and many other commodities – mostly unauthorized copies of luxury goods – are sold worldwide. China is the central node of this system, which has different ramifications all over the globe. This non-hegemonic world system is (re)produced by millions of people across the world who, from subaltern subject positions, take advantage of several forces unleashed by glob- alization (the internet and cell phones, for instance) in order to have access to flows of global . It is far from being separated from the hegemonic world system, the operators of which strive to regulate and control the non-hegemonic one, but it also profits from its existence in dif- ferent ways, as the importance of money laundering and fiscal paradises in the global economy demonstrates.57

Globalization and transnationalism: migrants, development, global capitalism, and governance The relationships between globalization and transnationalism are complicated. The definitions of the two concepts often overlap in diverse ways and are differently used in the literature. There are two major modes for understanding what transnationalism is: one weak and the other strong. The weak mode emphasizes the existence of a world without borders: that is, the manipulations that various agents and agencies impose on borders. The strong mode emphasizes how the ‘national’– that is, those experiences determined by the existence of the nation-state – increasingly loses power of structuration in the face of the dynamics of political, economic, cultural, and social forces that operate beyond the reach or control of nation-states. I subscribe to the mode that views trans- nationalism as a set of phenomena in which the power of structuration of the nation-state is irrel- evant or non-existent. Anthropologists such as Néstor García Canclini, one of the most well-known Latin American interpreters of globalization, often call attention to the fact that transnationalism is more complex than internationalization. The latter is seen as historically associated with the early processes of capitalist expansion and of nation-building since the sixteenth century. While transnationalism was certainly preceded by other ideologies, such as cosmopolitanism, it is envisaged as being related to more recent events, especially to the intensification of globalization brought on by the acceleration of time–space compression and the concomitant development of the new com- munication and information technologies of the late twentieth century. These movements have favoured a truly global integration, the planetary hegemony of financial capital, and a ‘more

54Ulf Hannerz, ‘Fluxos, fronteiras, híbridos: palavras-chave da antropologia transnacional’, Mana, 3, 1, 1997, pp. 7–39. 55Lapegna, ‘Ethnographers of the world’, p. 5. 56Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘Economic globalization from below’, Etnográfica, 10, 2, 2006, pp. 233–49. 57Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘Conclusion: globalization from below and the non-hegemonic world-system’, in Gordon Mathews, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, and Carlos Alba Vega, eds., Globalization from below: the world’s other economy, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012, pp. 221–35. For other views on economic globalization from below, see Lecler, ‘What makes globalization really new?’.

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complex and interdependent interaction among dispersed loci of production, circulation and consumption’.58 In the 1990s (and later), transnationalism became a great concern for anthropologists. Migration and identity studies became an especially fruitful area of research for inquiring about fragmented identities in a ‘borderless world’. The effects of the rapidly growing European Union, of new communication and information technologies, and of new migratory flows prompted visions of a fluid society made up of cosmopolitans who seemed to handle a multicultural world on their own behalf. In anthropology, the book Nations unbound: transnational projects, postco- lonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states, published in 1994, by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, drew attention to transnational migrants and posited the following:

We define ‘transnationalism’ as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi- stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. Immigrants who develop and maintain multiple relationships – familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political – that span borders we call ‘transmigrants’. An essential element of transnationalism is the multiplicity of involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host socie- ties. ::: Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states.59

This perspective allowed, among other things, the ethnographic study of transnationalism, as well as the practice of multi-sited ethnographies that took into consideration, for instance, the experiences of Haitian migrants in both New York City and . Indigenous migrants, from the state of Oaxaca, in Mexico, living in California could now be seen as producers of global spaces, and were analysed by Michael Kearney as members of Oaxacalifornia. This is an approach sensitive to the intertwining of the local and the global, to the imbrication of different places and their importance for the (re)production of migrants’ changing identities and political and eco- nomic lives.60 The influence of this perspective was felt beyond anthropology and beyond the United States, and is still present today. Take, for instance, the comparative studies by the Mexican anthropologists Federico Besserer and Raúl Nieto on what they call the ‘transnational city’, a concept that describes ‘the city made up of connections among urban margins, the city where globalization from below is practised, a demographically much larger city with a huge social and cultural density’.61 Anthropologists in other countries also consistently developed different interests in globalization and transnationalism. In Sweden, Hannerz published Transnational connections in 1996, a book in which he developed path-breaking analysis on cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity. Hannerz’s notion of transnational cultures led him to posit the existence of ‘physical centres’ of transnational culture.62 This, in turn, inspired me to do research on the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC. Based on a year’s , I analysed the ethnic segmentation of the Bank’s labour force, which was structured by global elite migratory flows based on education

58Néstor García Canclini, A globalização imaginada (The imagined globalization), São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras, 2003, p. 42. 59Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments and deterritorialized nation-states, Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1994, p. 7. 60Michael Kearney, Reconceptualizing the peasantry: anthropology in global perspective, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996. 61Federico Besserer and Raúl Nieto, ‘La ciudad transnacional comparada: derroteros conceptuales’, in Federico Besserer and Raúl Nieto, eds., La ciudad transnacional comparada: modos de vida, gubernamentalidad y desposesi´on, México: Juan Pablos Editor, 2015, p. 24. 62Hannerz, Transnational connections, p. 107.

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and on the command of the English language. I also analysed the political ethnic organizations of the Bank’s employees, and concluded that ‘development’ operated as a global discourse, which, besides pretending to be universal, unified an otherwise highly diversified migrant population.63 The World Bank and the development debate were not new to me. I had previously written a critique of development based on another ethnographic research, carried out on the border of Argentina and Paraguay, during the construction of a major dam on the Paraná river, the Yacyretá Hydroelectric High Dam.64 At that point I coined the notion of ‘consortiation’ to describe the series of changing alliances that transnational, international, national, regional, and local agents and agencies made, in order to create consortia and to guarantee the appropriate political and economic environment for the construction of the multi-billion dollar project. I also analysed a unique transnational fragmented identity, that of the ‘work site animals’, the label that the Argentinian workers applied to the migratory labour force controlled by major international civil engineering corporations, which was made up of hundreds of foreigners. These labour migrants rotate around the world, constructing large-scale projects in different continents, grad- ually losing their identifications with their countries of origin. They live in ethnically segmented labour camps built by the corporations in isolated areas, and they usually marry foreign women whom they meet in their migratory experiences. In Yacyretá, the lead construction firm was Italian. In consequence, children of the Italian project elite went to an Italian school set up by the corporation in the labour camp. I concluded that what was then called a ‘development project’ did not really bring ‘development’ to all involved in the initiative, especially not to local people, who were employed as cheap labour or suffered the consequences of forced resettlement caused by the large-scale construction project and the huge reservoir that it generated. In fact, the anthro- pological critique of ‘development’, represented by the work of other authors such as Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson, can be considered as one of the areas of global studies to which anthropologists have made major contributions.65 Anthropological contributions to ‘postdevelopment theory’ started to develop in the 1990s with the acknowledgement that ‘development’ is a discourse that is anchored in the unequal power existing among loci of the world system, and that is meant to legitimize capitalist expansion on a global scale. Since development discourses reflect Western ideologies, notions of an objecti- fied and commoditized nature, and unilineal conceptions of progressive time, the anthropological critique concluded that development cannot be seen as a universal proposition floating above other notions of good life and destiny. Instead, it should be seen as a mechanism of control that aims to ‘modernize’ and promote changes in native societies around the world. The formulation of notions such as vivir bien and buen vivir by indigenous intellectuals in Bolivia and Ecuador, and their incorporation in these countries’ constitutions (2009 and 2008, respectively), reinforced anthropologists’ long-standing claims regarding the importance of respecting local peoples’ sys- tems of knowledge and notions of destiny within development encounters and republican life. Such claims had previously made important impacts on global policy-making in the field of devel- opment, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, decades that were marked by the influence of envi- ronmentalism and ‘sustainable development’ within global governance agencies. Anthropologists working in the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, for instance, played a relevant role in advocating that people should be a priority in development encounters.66

63Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘Planeta banco: diversidad étnica, cosmopolitismo y transnacionalismo en el Banco Mundial’, in Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Postimperialismo: cultura y política en el mundo contemporáneo, Barcelona: Gedisa, 2003, pp. 125–41. 64Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Transnational capitalism and hydropolitics in Argentina, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994. 65Arturo Escobar, Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; James Ferguson, The anti-politics machine: ‘development’, depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 66Michael M. Cernea, ed., Putting people first: sociological variables in rural development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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The idea of finding agents, agencies, and places that can be effectively studied by the ethno- graphic method has taken anthropologists to carry out research in scenarios that hardly corre- spond to the image of a discipline dedicated to interpreting the ‘savage slot’.67 Karen Ho’s work is a fine example.68 Instead of abstractly discussing the prominence of financial capital in the globalized world, she carried out an ethnography on Wall Street: ‘the concentration of financial institutions and actor-networks (investment banks, pension and mutual funds, stock exchanges, hedge funds and private equity firms) that embody a particular financial ethos and set of practices, and act as primary spokes-people for the globalisation of U.S. capitalism’.69 Rather than naturalizing the conflation of US capitalism with Western and global capitalism, she contended that ‘capitalist actions are always already constructed through complex, contested, and locally specific cultural ethos, motivations, and practices that change overtime’; and she showed that it is the location of financially dominant capitalism ‘at a distinctly American centre of financial power – Wall Street investment banking – that enables its global recognition, spread, and dominance’.70 This ethnographic gaze oriented towards the study of globalization is perhaps also what led Ulf Hannerz to conduct research on foreign correspondents:

Turning to study of an occupation made sense partly because much of twentieth-century globalization was literally globalization at work. Business-people, academics, diplomats, con- sultants, artists, athletes – all of them now extend their occupation communities and cultures across borders. And a more specific reason for my curiosity about the foreign correspondents was that they seemed to be key players in today’s globalization of consciousness.71

The ‘globalization of consciousness’ can be driven by global governance institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations. In France, Marc Abélès is a leader of anthropological globalization studies and has published extensively on the subject.72 He coordi- nated a team of international anthropologists from Argentina, Canada, China, France, Germany, and the United States, to ‘carry on an anthropology of transnational governance’ based on research done within the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva. They focused on the organization’s most ‘characteristic features’: multiculturalism, negotiation, attitudes towards trade, and consen- sus.73 With a different motivation, another senior French anthropologist, Irène Bellier, conducted field research in the United Nations headquarters in New York, to understand how Indian acti- vists became part of international movements and participated in the formulation of global poli- cies concerning autochthonous peoples’ rights.74 She investigated the globalization of identities and how the interplay of the global and the local impacts the ways ‘in which indigenous issues are unfolding on the world stage and the ways in which they return to the local level, through development programmes and projects funded by various multilateral organizations and NGOs’.75

67Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness’, in Global transforma- tions: anthropology and the modern world, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 7–28. 68Karen Ho, Liquidated: an ethnography of Wall Street, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 69Ibid., p. 4. 70Ibid., p. 327. 71Ulf Hannerz, Foreign news: exploring the world of foreign correspondents, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 2. 72Marc Abélès, Anthropologie de la globalisation, Paris: Payot, 2008. 73‘Anthropology of the World Trade Organization’, 2008, http://www.iiac.cnrs.fr/article1249.html (consulted 30 October 2018). 74Irène Bellier, ‘La reconnaissance internationale des peuples autochtones’, in Irène Bellier, ed., Peuples autochtones dans le monde: les enjeux de la reconnaissance, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013, pp. 13–37. 75Irène Bellier, ‘Identité globalisée, territoires contestés: les enjeux des peuples autochtones dans la constellation onusienne’, 2006, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00258382/fr/ (consulted 30 October 2018).

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The impact of the internet The advent of the internet in the 1990s, masterfully interpreted by Manuel Castells in books such as The rise of the network society, opened up another area of interest highly relevant to globalization studies.76 Anthropologists and other social scientists turned their attention to what seemed to be the beginning of a new world. Arturo Escobar, in his pioneering article ‘Welcome to Cyberia’, posited that his point of departure was the belief that ‘any technology represents a cultural invention, in the sense that it brings forth a world; it emerges out of particular cultural conditions and in turn helps to create new ones’.77 Castells addressed a similar question, as noted by the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who reproduces a lengthy passage of Castells’ book End of millennium:

Why is this a new world? ::: Chips and computers are new; ubiquitous, mobile telecom- munications are new, genetic engineering is new; electronically integrated, global financial markets working in real time are new; an inter-linked capitalist economy embracing the whole planet, and not only some of its segments, is new; a majority of the urban labor force in knowledge and information processing in advanced economies is new; a majority of urban population in the planet is new; the demise of the Soviet Empire, the fading away of com- munism, and the end of the Cold War are new; the rise of the Asian Pacific as an equal part- ner in the global economy is new; the widespread challenge to patriarchalism is new; the universal consciousness on ecological preservation is new; and the emergence of a network society, based on a space of flows, and on timeless time, is historically new.78

As Carmen Bueno Castellanos states, what Castells calls the space of flows ‘has overtaken the conception of georeferenced space. In the network society, alternative modes of accumulation are based on economic strategies that are diluted within a relational logic, taking on a kaleidoscopic morphology in constant expansion and contraction. The idea of “place” disappears, making room for the social and relational construction of discontinuous spaces.’79 The flexible qualities of cyber- space, a borderless virtual space where a myriad of subjects located in different areas of the world can gather, prompted me to call the internet the techno-symbolic basis of the ‘transnational virtual-imagined community’. I was inspired by Benedict Anderson’s well-known interpretation of the relationship between print capitalism and the emergence of nationalism.80 I have argued that cyberspace made the transnational level of integration visible and manageable, and it gave political agents the possibility to practise ‘witnessing at a distance’ and ‘political activism at a dis- tance’, thus creating ‘cybercultural politics’ as a contemporary transnational political force.81 More recently, I have published on the ‘hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism’ in order to explain how Google and Facebook came to be among the most powerful corporations and dominate today’s hearts and minds by transforming words into a new commodity as well as by exploring the virtual crowds’ work and creativity for free.82

76Manuel Castells, The rise of the network society, vol. 1 of The information age: economy, society, and culture, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 77Arturo Escobar, ‘Welcome to Cyberia: notes on the anthropology of cyberculture’, Current Anthropology, 35, 3, 1994, pp. 211–31. 78Manuel Castells, End of millennium, vol. 3 of The information age: economy, society, and culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, p. 336, cited in Eriksen, Globalization, p. 14. 79Bueno Castellanos, ‘World-systems theory’, p. 6530. 80Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London: Verso, 2006 (first published 1983). 81Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘Cybercultural politics: political activism at a distance in a transnational world’, in Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of politics, politics of cultures: re-visioning Latin American social move- ments, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, pp. 325–52. 82Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘El precio de la palabra: la hegemonía del capitalismo electr´onico-informático y el googleísmo’, Desacatos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 56, 2018, pp. 16–33.

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Anthropologists’ interest in the internet has developed over the years and, as we should expect, has also involved discussions on ethnography, as many researchers started to study different vir- tual worlds. Tom Boellstorff’s work is particularly outstanding. He wrote an ethnographic account of Second Life, the virtual world owned by Linden Lab, to study virtual worlds in their own terms, and to contribute to the understanding of new forms of sociality within cyberspace.83 He also wrote with other colleagues a book on methodological aspects of doing research in virtual worlds and co-edited one on big data.84

World anthropologies: thinking anthropology on the global level Besides highlighting the agency of the ‘global South’ in the production of theory,85 anthropologists have used their accumulated knowledge on globalization and Western dominance to analyse their own discipline’s internal global hierarchies and the flows of power and visibility within the ‘world system of anthropological production’, as the Japanese anthropologist Takami Kuwayama calls it.86 In the early 2000s, a movement called the World Anthropologies Network (WAN) posited the need to redefine the relationships among anthropologists and anthropologies on the global level.87 The WAN criticized the hegemony of Anglo-American anthropology, and its agendas and styles, advocating the need for more horizontal, heteroglossic relationships among world anthropologies.88 The goal was to intervene in the global flows of anthropological knowledge, and to benefit from a more complex cross-fertilization. The discipline’s own diversity would coun- teract the trend towards a monological anthropology dominated by Anglo-American production. A first and urgent task was to make visible the histories of the anthropologies without history, to use the ironic expression coined by the Mexican anthropologist Esteban Krotz.89 The WAN made theoretical contributions to the understanding of anthropology’s global dis- semination and reproduction. Among such contributions I will highlight the notions of metro- politan provincialism, the closure of the disciplinary centres to knowledge produced elsewhere, and provincial cosmopolitanism, the opening of the non-hegemonic centres to a plurality of loci of enunciation of anthropological knowledge.90 The WAN also inspired practical initiatives to construct the newly envisaged scenario. In 2004, influenced by the world anthropologies’ debate, another network, the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) was founded in Recife, Brazil, in a meeting attended by fourteen presidents of national and international anthropological associations. The presidents of the national associations of Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, , South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States were present. The Japanese association sent its director of international relations. The following international associations also attended the meeting: the

83Tom Boellstorff, Coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 84Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pierce, and T. L. Taylor, Ethnography and virtual worlds: a handbook of method, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012; Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, eds., Data, now bigger and better!, Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015. 85Jean Comaroff and , Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, New York: Routledge, 2011. 86Takami Kuwayama, Native anthropology: the Japanese challenge to Western academic hegemony, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2004. 87Ribeiro, ‘World anthropologies: anthropological cosmopolitanisms’, pp. 483–98; Eduardo Restrepo and Arturo Escobar, ‘Other anthropologies and anthropologies otherwise: steps to a world anthropologies framework’, Critique of Anthropology, 25, 2, 2005, pp. 99–129. 88Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, eds., World anthropologies: disciplinary transformations within systems of power, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006. 89Esteban Krotz, ‘Anthropologies of the South: their rise, their silencing, their characteristics’, Critique of Anthropology, 17, 3, 1997, pp. 237–51. 90Ribeiro, ‘World anthropologies: cosmopolitics’, pp. 363–86.

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European Association of Social Anthropologists, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), the Latin American Association of Anthropology, and the Pan- African Anthropological Association. The WCAA aimed to change the global disciplinary politics to construct a more plural global anthropology. Its online journal, Déjà Lu (Already Read), republishes, in any language, articles of international interest that have appeared in anthropological journals across the globe; the 2018 issue had forty-four articles, freely available online. More than fifty associations are currently linked to the WCAA, which, in 2018, came together with the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) to found a new bicameral organization, the World Anthropological Union (WAU). According to Thomas Reuter:

It has become much easier to work internationally since the WCAA was founded. Unique national anthropologies are now being showcased by the WCAA at major conferences. In collaboration with the IUAES, the WCAA is in a position to provide better access to knowl- edge, and also to the means of disseminating knowledge, by using new media technologies according to principles of open access.91

When acting politically to develop a more heteroglossic discipline that takes advantage of its own global diversity, anthropologists have consistently taken into consideration the interplay and tensions between local and global processes in order to frame new transnational disciplinary worldviews. Johannes Fabian rightly noted that the WAN’s project cannot be reduced to the issue of fostering the visibility of non-hegemonic, national anthropologies.92 Rather, ‘the idea is to give voice to critical transnational and cosmopolitan anthropologists to construct global alliances and promote cooperation’.93

Twenty-first-century anthropology and globalization Since the beginning of the discipline in the nineteenth century, anthropologists have been inter- ested in understanding a multiplicity of subjects. In this endeavour, they have used various meth- ods and have been influenced by different theories and concepts. In consequence, anthropology has developed relations with , biology, cultural studies, economics, studies, geography, history, linguistics, literary analysis, media and internet studies, philosophy, political sciences, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and statistics. Additionally, many of us, who ‘wish to understand our moment in history’, know, like Keith Hart does, that we ‘need a global perspective on humanity’.94 Furthermore, I cannot but agree with Marc Abélès, who, in his book on the anthropology of globalization, refuses the image of a discipline practised by ‘the last zealots of a world without history’ and relegated to contemplating the ‘inertia of tradition’. This perspective assigns to economists, sociologists, and experts in international relations the power to understand globalization, while anthropologists are destined to the margins, to the periphery, to understand the local, the idiosyncratic, the vision of the vanquished. He concludes that we need ‘to think of globalization ::: as a fabric of interactions that is possible to be apprehended in localized sites and in the analysis of phenomena capable of being the object of fine ethnographies’.95

91Thomas Reuter, ‘World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA)’, in Callan, International encyclopedia of anthropology, vol. 12, p. 6513, pp. 6506–14. 92Johannes Fabian, ‘Comments on changing global flows in anthropological knowledge’, Focaal: Journal of Historical and Global Anthropology, 63, 2012, pp. 62–5. 93Ribeiro, ‘World anthropologies: cosmopolitanisms’, p. 489. 94Keith Hart, ‘An anthropology of the internet’, 2010, http://thememorybank.co.uk/2010/02/06/an-anthropology-of-the- internet-2/ (consulted 25 July 2017). 95Abélès, Anthropologie de la globalisation, p. 244.

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I also agree with Ulf Hannerz, who, in a review for the American Anthropologist of the book Global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems, published in 2005 and edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, wrote the following:

Twenty-first-century anthropology evidently need not, should not, give up its ambition of global reach, even when attending to the phenomena of high modernity in technology, sci- ence, business, or statecraft. Perhaps, to a degree, Global Assemblages exemplifies an anthro- pology without ethnography ::: there is little of the close-up observation of the everyday that has been central to the discipline. ::: it could be that we see ::: instances of another style of anthropology, dealing with matters on another scale :::. Reinventing anthropology here may be in a significant part a matter of retooling for an increasingly sophisticated han- dling of combinations of texts, documents, media materials, and other sources.96

However, anthropologists have also retained their interest in the emblematic issues of the discipline. They have reacted and criticized the intolerance that can be said to be feeding the beginning of a post-multicultural era.97 For instance, in 2016, Polish anthropologists issued an anti-discrimination manifesto that was internationally acclaimed. In a representative passage, they said:

We strongly oppose discrimination, exclusion and hate speech motivated by cultural, reli- gious, ethnic, gender or world-view differences. We protest the conscious manipulation of facts, the ideologization of beliefs, xenophobia, and violence directed at people who represent different cultures, identities, political stances, faiths and values. Such acts of hatred, which have become more frequent in Polish society today, undermine the foun- dations of the social order and frequently lead to real-life tragedies. We stand behind reliable knowledge about culture and society, call for mutual respect, and demand respect for human- ist values. Our goal and dream is a diverse and open society built on the ideals of democracy and human rights.98

Current political and economic dynamics also affect the practice of the discipline. In different national contexts, anthropologists – both as researchers and as professors – are being affected by the destructive policies of neoliberal globalization. Some of the structural processes characterizing these movements within academia are the so-called ‘audit culture’ and ‘productivism’. These measures are applied worldwide and mean the control of scholarly production based on quantity. Anthropology, with its need for long periods of ethnographic practice, has been particularly affected. The British anthropologist edited a book and wrote about ‘audit cul- ture’, making this expression internationally known.99 Other anthropologists, such as Cris Shore and Sue Wright, have consistently researched the changes brought by in different university and scientific milieus, namely the end of academic autonomy and the transformation of higher education into a business more ‘responsive’ to market forces, ‘commercial interests and private providers’. In a special issue of the Italian journal Anuac on this subject, Shore and Wright agree with the Indian anthropologist Satish Deshpande that neoliberalization means

96Ulf Hannerz, review of Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, American Anthropologist, 108, 1, 2006, p. 254. 97Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘Giro global a la derecha y la relevancia de la antropología’, Encartes Antropol´ogicos, 1, 1, 2018, pp. 5–26, https://www.encartesantropologicos.mx/giro-global-a-la-derecha-y-la-relevancia-de-la-antropologia/ (consulted 31 October 2018). 98Polish Anthropologists, ‘Anti-discrimination manifesto of Polish anthropologists and ethnologists’, http://zjazd.weebly. com/english.html (consulted 2 November 2016). 99Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy, London: Routledge, 2000.

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the death of the public university. They argue that ‘this model is having a transformative effect, not only on the core values and distinctive purpose of the public university, but also on academic subjectivities of the professional ethos that has traditionally shaped academia’.100 They also iden- tify the establishment of an emerging entrepreneurial culture within the universities.

Conclusion I am convinced that the work and engagement with cutting-edge debates, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and global warming, are a guarantee that anthropologists will continue to make their contributions to the understanding of subjects directly related to the vast interdisci- plinary study area named ‘globalization’.101 These issues are in tune with anthropology’s interests in what is human and how humans affect and are affected by nature and technology anywhere. Moreover, the anthropological sensibility to what is common and what is diverse in human expe- rience, to how the relationships between the local and the global are constructed and lived, is a major asset in a time in which the definition of what is human is changing and the possibility of living together and enjoying cultural diversity is threatened by politically conservative forces on the local, national, and global levels. Anthropologists have long been engaged in pressing issues of their times. In the process of exerting their cosmopolitics, they have accumulated significant knowledge of the local–global ten- sion, have explored ethnographically how this tension has been experienced by people in diverse cultural, ethnic, gender, and class settings, have formulated different visions about what it means to be human, and have become increasingly critical of the world in which we live. In tune with this long-standing history, global anthropological studies is a thriving field that will remain with us as long as the anthropological imagination is captivated by the need to understand the relations between homogeneity and heterogeneity in an increasingly interconnected world.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro is a National Researcher 3 of the Mexican Council of Science and Technology-CONACYT. He has published or edited twenty-three books and many articles. He is co-editor with Gordon Mathews and Carlos Alba Vega of Globalisation from below (2012), and co-editor with Arturo Escobar of World anthropologies (2006). His latest book is Otras globalizaciones (2018). He was the founder of the World Council of Anthropological Associations, and a vice-president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, of which he is a honorary member.

100Cris Shore and Susan Wright, ‘Neoliberalisation and the death of the public university’, Anuac, 5, 1, 2016, p. 41. 101Alan Smart and Josephine Smart, Posthumanism: anthropological insights, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017; , ‘Humano, demasiado humano?’, Desacatos, 54, 2017, pp. 16–27; Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016; Susan A. Crate, ed., Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions, New York: Routledge, 2009.

Cite this article: Lins Ribeiro G. 2019. The global/local tension in the history of anthropology. Journal of Global History 14: 375–394, doi:10.1017/S1740022819000172

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